Sumpah Pontianak – review

Director: B. Narayan Rao

Release date: 1958

Contains spoilers

This is actually the third and final of a series of films about a pontianak and is translated as Curse of the Pontianak. I feel (as I have watched this standalone without having seen the other two films) that this does follow on – you can feel the threads coming through, the taken for granted moments that the earlier films likely addressed – but it is perfectly watchable in its own right. It has some bizarre musical moments (satay song, I’m looking at you) and some truly awful looking creature costumes that have a charm to them nevertheless.

Salmah Ahmad as Maria

It starts with a torch wielding mob pitching up at the village chief’s house but Samad (Mustapha Maarof) calms them, suggesting that the pontianak will not go against her daughter’s wishes. The daughter is Maria (Salmah Ahmad) – the bride of Samad. From what I could gather Chomel (Maria Menado), the pontianak, must have agreed to have a nail in her neck to limit her powers and to leave the place.

Maria Menado as Chomel

We see Chomel, who looks like she has some form of skin condition, approach a grave and speak to the occupant who is her father. She admits that she had used magic to try and make herself look beautiful. The spirit of her father speaks and says it is too late for her, she carries the curse of the pontianak. She hobbles off into the forest and eventually finds a new village where she manages to find work.

Satay song

Maria, however, misses her mother and when she doesn’t appear to her (though she does hallucinate her in her beautiful form), she sneaks off and searches for her. This leads Samad and a group of men from the village to go out looking for her. One of the group is a local satay street vendor and he gets two songs about satay during the film – the first sees him leading a chorus of kids pied piper like through the village. It is truly bizarre.

the pontianak

So there are a few misadventures through the film. Samad splits the group up, going on his own and ends up rescuing Maria from an Orang Hutan who has kidnapped her. The other group reach the village where Chomel has moved to, where livestock and people have been killed. A pontianak is blamed – and the finger pointed at Chomel. It is actually a strange beaked human-sized lizard killing people. During that misadventure Chomel, running from angry villagers, pulls a bamboo stake from the floor and out of a buried corpse, who then comes to life. He was cursed to live pinned to his grave 50-years before and the staking is reminiscent, of course, of western vampire myth. He takes a fancy to Maria and, in a strange costume, steals the popular young woman.

pulling the nail out

To be able to save her daughter Chomel needs her powers and convinces the villagers to pull her nail from her neck. There is some doubt as they do not want her to suck their blood but they agree, though pull it out with a very long piece of string so they are a distance away, and this allows her to take a fanged pontianak form and to fly. The pontianak form looks awful but is also kind of fun, in a B-movie sort of way and that sums up the film.

flying

Not a great piece of cinema, with songs that break pace and an awful comedy character in the form of (and named as) dullard Dol. Yet there is some naïve fun to be had in this. After all, it's 1958 and this is perhaps pathing the way for Malay(/Singapore) creature features of the future. Jamming the various monsters in means it doesn’t allow itself to get boring. I mean, it might be strange but even the first satay song is kinda fun (not all the songs are welcome, however). 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.